Orange County History

When handed lemons, people are usually admonished to make lemonade. The city of Tustin made a park. Orange and lemon trees once carpeted Orange County the way subdivisions do today. In 1929, for instance, The Times reported Tustin's record annual crop down to the box: 340,928, to be exact. "With the orange season at its height and the lemon season drawing to a close, reports from the four packing houses in the Tustin district this week show that growers are receiving high returns," one story read.

Cal State Fullerton and the Orange County Pioneer Council inducted a new series of books into their collections of Orange County history this week in a ceremony at the campus. The most-prized addition to the separate collections is a series of interviews with Arthur J. McFadden, who was instrumental in the development of Orange County's agricultural base after the turn of the century. The interviews were conducted about five years before his death in 1975.

June 21, 2007 | Gustavo Arellano, GUSTAVO ARELLANO is a contributing editor to Opinion and author of the new book "¡Ask a Mexican!"

MY HISTORY TEACHER in high school was a good man, but we sure didn't learn much in his class. We read about Brown vs. Board of Education, but not that its roots were in Mendez vs. Westminster, the landmark 1946 case that ended segregation in Orange County schools. Heard about the Depression -- but not about how local police and sheriff's deputies brutally repressed a strike at a citrus grove just down the road from Anaheim High.

How did a convicted prostitute get on a list of Orange County's outstanding women? How was a bandit hanged from a tree branch so low to the ground that a tall man must stoop to walk under it? How does the county continue attracting tourists to an event that never happens? It's a myth-tory. Myths can attach themselves to historical events like barnacles to a rock, and reality seems never able to pry them loose.

The second annual Conference of Orange County History will be held at Chapman College Sept. 23 and 24, featuring discussions on traditional subjects of archeology and preservation as well as on such contemporary topics as the history of gays and ethnic groups in the county. The conference's highlight will be a dinner of traditional Spanish-Mexican food at the Mission San Juan Capistrano. The dinner will include tortillas, prepared by the participants, baked in the mission's clay ovens.

Stephen Donaldson of Newport Beach was first exposed to "the romance of railroading" at 16, when he accompanied a friend on a train trip to Colorado and Wyoming in the '60s. His interest in railroad history continued to grow as an Orange Coast College student two years later when he persuaded his English professor to let him write an assigned theme paper about railroads, which interested him, rather than about literature, which didn't.

No one really knows who murdered Walter and Beulah Overell. What is known is that on March 15, 1947, they met a sudden death when their 47-foot yacht--the Mary E--exploded around 11 in the morning. Thirteen sticks of unexploded dynamite were found on the cabin cruiser moored in Newport Harbor. The rest had gone off, leaving the Overalls dead.

Some prehistoric fossils still sit in their plaster jackets in a Santa Ana parking lot, but now they are sheltered from rain and sun by a newly built wooden roof. Other fossils have been moved into a warehouse nearby where recent roof repairs provide a dry haven.

It's easy to miss the Earth-N-Ware shop in Orange. Coming west from Shaffer Street, there's a large strip mall, fancy Indian restaurant and Pep Boys store. Then the tiny red farmhouse comes into view. "They call it the old red barn," Jerry Newton says of the rickety wooden building housing his unusual business, a smoke and pottery shop that operates under the slogan "Our Cigarettes Really Are Cheaper."

Once again, Orange County is facing a bad fire season. Well, not quite as bad as last year's worst-ever season, according to Sgt. Steven Miller, a spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority. But, he said, it's going to be really, really bad. "In Southern California you don't even have to be in fire season to have a major fire," Miller said. In fact, he said, sometimes the season's boundaries are expanded to accommodate the fires.

May 18, 2003 | Steven B. Frates, Steven B. Frates is a fellow at the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College.

Orange County is a fascinating place, and its current popularity owes much to its history, though that history is often dismissed. It can still be seen as you drive around the county, if you look carefully, and it can tell us quite a bit about the challenges and opportunities we face. Driving north on Coast Highway past Hoag Memorial Hospital, off to the right you can still see open bluffs topped by sage scrub, and a few working oil wells.

It may be the clearest sign yet of the changes brewing on Orange County's rural edge: Cook's Corner is for sale. The storied biker bar and greasy spoon at the doorstep of the Cleveland National Forest was placed on the market last week, in the wake of a series of county approvals for tract homes and a mini mall nearby. The price is $2.9 million, said Scott Hauck of Landmark Real Estate of Mission Viejo, who is handling the sale. Owner Frank DeLuna could not be reached for comment.

Nearly a decade after the largest mass arrest in Orange County history, county supervisors have paid $280,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by more than 100 laborers jailed during a bitter strike by drywall workers. The settlement--the highest civil rights payout against the Sheriff's Department in years--closes the final chapter in a legal saga involving the 1992 detention of a convoy of drywallers accused of conspiring to kidnap replacement workers. Deputies jailed 153 of the strikers.

The crust of development that covers Orange County has obliterated nearly all of its past--the groves, farms, ranches, packinghouses, country roads, old downtowns. But in the seams between the planned communities and the redevelopment projects, some of the county's history survives. A few bits remain virtually unchanged. Others have been moved and preserved in historical parks.

It's 1909 in Tustin, population something under 900, and if you're a boy who loves baseball, you have only primitive options. The closest big-league teams are about 1,500 miles away in St. Louis, so distant they might as well be in China. There is only one way to find out what's happening: the newspaper. It reports that the great Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner are leading Detroit and Pittsburgh to the World Series, but you have never seen them except in stiff, posed portraits in magazines.

Who is the greatest surfer in Orange County history? The question seems easy enough. After all, plenty of surfing history has been made on the coast of this county. Duke Kahanamoku, the original beach boy, surfed Big Corona early this century with Orange County's prodigal waterman, Lorrin "Whitey" Harrison. Hobie Alter, an excellent surfer himself, opened the world's first surf shop in Dana Point in the 1950s. The mainland's only major surfing contest is held every summer in Huntington Beach, a.

It was just past midnight on March 3, 1938, when Edna Wisser gingerly walked into her daughter's bedroom to wake her up, and to show her what nature looks like on a bender. "Mother woke me up sometime in the darkness of the night," said Marion Harvey, now 78, an Anaheim High senior at the time. "Very calmly, she said: 'I want you to look outside your bedroom window, because something is happening that you will never see again.' " She was right.

Strictly speaking, it's not within Tustin, but it is Tustin's landmark--a hill only 347 feet high and 1,000 feet long with rust-colored outcroppings that gave it its name: Red Hill. Nowadays, it is the head of McClean Drive just northwest of Browning Avenue. Now a state historical landmark surrounded by homes, it still rises as the familiar prominence it has been since before recorded history. American Indians called it Katuktu, meaning place of refuge.

The Historical Commission of Orange County will join Cal State Fullerton this fall for a conference designed to address topics from historical landmarks to setting up archives. Panelists will discuss new techniques for gathering and compiling historical data and will address how events in Orange County's past have helped to shape its communities. The "Pioneering" Orange County History Conference 2000 will be held Nov. 3 to 5 at locations throughout the county.